Illinois's career standard, criterion by criterion: 12 of 31 matched, 19 not claimed.

Illinois compels a middle-grades career plan by law. Public Act 102-0917 (HB3296), signed 27 May 2022, requires every Illinois district enrolling students in any of grades 6-12 to adopt and implement career-exploration and career-development activities for each of those grades, aligned to a framework substantially similar to PaCE. That extended PaCE's original 8-12 scope down to grade 6 and set a compliance deadline of 1 July 2023, which is why the current framework carries a 07/23 footer. The document below is both the standard and the thing districts cite for the mandate — there is no separate plan artefact.

Illinois PaCE (Postsecondary and Career Expectations) Framework — Middle School, published by Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC), jointly with Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), Illinois Community College Board (ICCB), Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), grades 6-8. 6-8 — this framework's middle-school panel. The full PaCE framework the statute names runs 6-12; the high-school panel is a separate document and out of scope here. Publisher's landing page: https://www.isac.org/pace/index.html The source carries no numeric or lettered codes of any kind. It is a single-page infographic in three grade-band columns — 'By the end of 6th grade', '7th grade', '8th grade' — each a plain bulleted list under 'A student should be exposed to:' or 'A student should be supported to:'. A Venn diagram elsewhere on the page names three cross-cutting domains (Aspiration, Self-Advocacy, Planning), but the bullets are not tagged to them, so the rows below are grouped by grade-band column, which is how the document itself organises them.

It means the platform itself produces the artefact the criterion asks for, with nothing a teacher has to add. 6 criteria of the 31 are closed this way: G6-1, G6-4, G7-13, G8-19, G8-20 and G8-29. Each of those rows names the surface and the artefact, and several carry a coverage caveat — how many careers actually hold the field being claimed — because a reviewer will check.

It means the platform supplies the data or the assessment result and a teacher runs the classroom half — it is weaker, and it is labelled separately for that reason. 6 criteria are closed this way: G7-7, G7-14, G8-18, G8-21, G8-23 and G8-28. A plan a system wrote for the student would not satisfy the standard, and claiming it would not be worth much either.

Because the 6 and the 6 are different kinds of evidence — one is work the software does on its own, the other is work a teacher does with something the software supplies — and merging them into one headline number would flatter the platform at your expense. Every row states which of the two it is, and the counts are shown as separate pills rather than added together.

We make no claim on them. No JobCannon surface — assessment, career-page field or glossary entry — addresses them, and they are listed exactly as plainly as the 12 we do claim: same row format, same visual weight, a stated "not claimed" rather than an absence.

The grade columns (G6 / G7 / G8) are Illinois's own — the framework is organised as "By the end of 6th grade" and so on. The number after the dash is OURS: the source is a one-page infographic with bulleted lists and no criterion numbering of any kind. Cite the bullet text to Illinois, never the code.

Two differently-worded versions exist. An ISBE-hosted file named MS-PaCE-Framework-Draft.pdf carries the footer ISAC #F3766 05/18, labels the third domain 'Identity', and orders the grade-8 items differently. The current statute-driven version carries the footer ISAC #F3808 07/23 — matching the July 2023 deadline — renames that domain 'Aspiration', and is the one district pages link to. Only the 07/23 version is transcribed below. The 2018 file is named here because a real domain-label disagreement exists between the two. The document itself is linked at the top of the table, so you can check any row against the source rather than take our word for it.